This invention relates to all-fabric, body armor for use in protecting the torsos of women, particularly women engaged in law enforcement or military activities.
All-fabric, body armor for protecting the torsos of human beings requires the use of heavy fabric woven from yarn havin high ballistic resistance and, therefore, usually high tenacity, high impact resistance, and other desirable properties contributing to ballistic resistance. Such body armor, if made sufficiently thick to stop small arms missiles at close ranges, is invariably quite stiff and, therefore, difficult to fabricate into body armor garments which can be worn with reasonable comfort while still providing good ballistic protection. This is especially true for body armor for women since the stiff material of the all-fabric, body armor, such as that made from aramid polymer yarns, does not readily conform to the curvature of the body and, therefore, is difficult to use for making satisfactory body armor for women. The usual expedients of cutting fabric sections and seaming them together has not resulted in producing torso protecting body armor having good ballistic protection properties as well as being comfortable to wear for long periods of time because seams of ordinary or customary nature employed in the making of clothing are easily penetrated by small arms missiles at close ranges. Butted seams are particularly vulnerable. But even overlapping seams having conventional amounts of overlapping permit small arms missiles that impact directly at the seam edges to penetrate through the body armor by getting under the edges of the overlapping seam and following a path more or less parallel to the overlapped and seamed portions of fabric.
It is, therefore, an object of the invention to provide an all-fabric, lightweight, body armor garment for the protection of the torso of a woman against small arms missiles and spall which is contoured so as to be reasonably comfortable while providing good ballistic resistance.
A further object of the invention is to provide a method for making an all-fabric, lightweight, body armor garment for the protection of the torso of a woman against small arms missiles and spall and having the abovedescribed properties and advantages.
Other objects and advantages will become apparent from the following description of the invention.